Six people stuck in a Perth quarantine centre after a deadly ‘hantavirus’ outbreak on their cruise ship have discovered they’re not infected.
The four Australian citizens, one permanent resident and a New Zealand national quarantining for three weeks in Western Australia’s Bullsbrook Centre received their blood test results yesterday.
The federal Health Department confirmed they are well and will only be retested if they develop symptoms.
Which leaves us with the question: what is the exact meaning and origin of this word ‘hantavirus’?
Well, this may not help, but here’s the Oxford’s official definition: ‘Hantavirus is a genus of spherical, enveloped, single-stranded RNA viruses (family Bunyaviridae) which can be transmitted to humans via the urine, faeces, and saliva of their natural rodent hosts, and typically cause either a haemorrhagic fever with nephritis or acute respiratory disease.’
(I hope you were paying attention; I may ask questions later.)
What the word ‘rodent’ tells us is that it is cuddly little creatures such as rats carry this virus (if it kills us, why doesn’t it kill the rats?)
The clever folk at the Merriam-Webster tell me that the word combines ‘hanta’ (from Hantaan, a river in South Korea near where rodents carrying the virus were collected in the mid-1970s) and ‘virus.’
According to the Oxford it was recorded as a new virus from 1984.
And simplifying the list of symptoms above—this ‘hantavirus’ can give you a high fever, a rash, difficulty breathing, kidney damage—and maybe a lot of other nasty stuff.
So, stay away from those rats!
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